Monday, November 22, 2004

In case you have nothing to do

Here [1.5 Mb pdf] are the slides for a talk I gave Friday at Syracuse University. It went pretty well, lots of questions, which is always good (since I could answer them). The talk ranged pretty wide, I tried to cover our whole lattice field theory program, rather than bore people with technical details of lattice peturbation theory. I think it was the right approach for a non-lattice field theory crowd.

I like to go give talks to other groups. It is a good way of seeing how your ideas play with people who don't work with you on a day by day basis.

1. Are all the improved lattice actions verified to be asymptotically free?Yes, since they all reduce to the Yang-Mills action up to irrelevent correction terms.

2. Do you compute a figure of merit for lattice QCD methods,This was addressed by people in the mid-nineties. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-lat/9507010 is an example of these sorts of studies.

In that way, we can separate out the improvement because of better computers from the improvement because of better physics.Well, you can make quick estimates based on the a^{-6-8} scaling versus the trival additional cost of improving. It's clear that better computers get you somewhere, but without the improvement, we'd be stuck for 10 more years.